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Easily connect .NET applications with real-time data from Excel spreadsheets. Use Excel to manage the data that powers your applications.

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LINQ to Excel Data


LINQ offers versatile querying capabilities within the .NET Framework (v3.0+), offering a straightforward method for programmatic data access through CData ADO.NET Data Providers. In this article, we demonstrate the use of LINQ to retrieve information from the Excel Data Provider.

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Excel via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Excel. To achieve this, we will use LINQ to Entity Framework, which facilitates the generation of connections and can be seamlessly employed with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data through LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

  1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
  2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
  3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Excel Data Source".

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    The ExcelFile, under the Authentication section, must be set to a valid Excel File.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    Excel File='C:/MyExcelWorkbooks/SampleWorkbook.xlsx';
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting ExcelEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
  6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select , update, delete, and insert commands. For example:

ExcelEntities context = new ExcelEntities(); var sheetQuery = from sheet in context.Sheet select sheet; foreach (var result in sheetQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Name); }

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.